


A (not so) Mysterious Murder

by Nelalila



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Bickering, Competition, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Escape, Excited Peter Parker, Gen, Grumpy Tony Stark, Hangover, Humor, Irondad, Mild Language, Murder, Murder Mystery, New Years, Peter Parker is a Little Shit, Peter is a Little Shit, Plot Twists, Precious Peter Parker, Teamwork, escape room, kind of, rated for language, spiderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:13:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22066816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelalila/pseuds/Nelalila
Summary: [Crack] A hangover, grumpy Tony Stark and an eager, excited Peter Parker spend the first day of the new year in a rundown hotel room, trying to solve a mysterious case of murder. To succeed, however, they have to overcome an even bigger challenge first: stop bickering.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 9
Kudos: 49





	A (not so) Mysterious Murder

**Author's Note:**

> After all the evil and angst I wrote this year, I wanted to try and start the new year off with something silly/funny ;) Don’t take this too seriously ;) The silliness will be “explained” in the end (if you haven't figured it out by then).

“I’m so honored that you’re here, Mr. Stark, Iron Man, sir, and…?” The young woman beams at Peter.

“I’m Peter. H-His intern.”

“Ah. Uhm, okay, well, Mr. Stark and… Peter, you two are our only hope of solving this case. This has been the fifth victim murdered in this room in two months. The hotel owners are terrified, and the FBI has no idea how the killer manages to get in and out without being seen by anyone. The door and window have always been locked from the inside.”

“He came in through a probably hidden door behind that large closet over there,” Tony says dryly, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, earning himself a warning glare from Peter. “Ssh.”

“A-Anyway,” - the girl clears her throat – “I wish you good luck. If you need anything, just call for me, but I’m warning you… the murderer might be lurking inside the hotel somewhere.”

She winks at the two men and steps out of the room, closing the door behind her. As soon as she’s gone, Tony flings himself onto the single bed and sighs. “I think I’m going to take a short nap.”

“No, you won’t,” Peter huffs, “don’t be such a buzzkill. We have to solve the mystery and prevent-”

“He came through that closet, mystery solved. Why don’t you just break it apart and see what’s behind it?”

“I’m _not_ going to destroy someone else’s property just because you’re channeling your inner sloth today. Do what you want, but I don’t want to tell everyone that we couldn’t even solve-“

“All right, all right.” Tony gets up with a sigh and groans, rubbing his throbbing temple in an effort to ease his headache. Peter bites his tongue to prevent himself from saying what he’s tempted to, and instead, pulls out an old suitcase he found under the bed, sticking his hand inside, feeling around. Meanwhile, Tony rattles at the locked closet door. “I’m telling you. That’s what we need to focus on.”

“I found a key!” Peter yells excitedly and pulls a small, golden key form the insides of the suitcase. “Where do you think it fits?”

“If it’s not the closet, I don’t care.”

The teen rolls his eyes. “Can you _please_ stop nagging now and be a little more serious?” Once again, Tony sighs, but then he finally takes off his sunglasses, shooting Peter an earnest look. “ _Okay_. I’m serious. What do you want me to do?”

“Uhm, _look around_?”

They split up; while Peter is taking a thorough look at the bed and nightstand, Tony is examining the window, the ancient looking TV cupboard, and the desk. After another minute, the boy finds a small hole in the nightstand under the lamp. He can’t help beaming proudly when the key fits, opening a hidden small drawer with a silent _click._ “Found a flashlight and another key.”

“And I found another suitcase over here. We need a five-digit code to open the lock.”

Next, Peter examines the left, smaller part of the closet that Tony hadn’t paid much attention to earlier. He cheers when the key from the nightstand opens the locked door, only to sigh in exasperation when he finds _another_ locked suitcase and two weird pieces of paper. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Tony gives a loud, bored yawn and takes a half-hearted glimpse at the papers. “One leg and one arm, each with a number. No idea what this means.”

“Maybe we have to open the suitcase first. We need two codes, each one three digits long.”

“Jesus Christ, can you please hit me? Like, really hard, to make sure I fall unconscious?”

Although it’s tempting, Peter refuses to comply and points at the curtains instead. “Have you taken a close look at them already?”

“Yes. There’s nothing there.”

Wary, Peter he decides it’s better not to trust his grumpy, hangover mentor on it. It turns out it is a wise decision to check the curtains again because after only a few seconds of feeling them up, a loud _CLONK_ makes both men flinch.

“Was that -?” Tony asks with a somewhat pained expression.

“Yup,” Peter snorts and bends down to pick up the key that fell out of the thick, old fabric. “How the fuck could you have missed that? Did you even touch the curtains?”

“ _Language,”_ Tony hisses, “Also, I _did_ touch them, but… they smell musty and gross, I have no intention of getting lice or whatever other disgusting bugs are living in there.”

“Don’t be such a pu-I-I-mean,” - the boy coughs loudly – “ _Prince_. I meant to say prince.”

Tony narrows his eyes to slits. “Oh yeah? Just you wait, you insolent… _varmint_.” The man starts going through the cupboard and desk so thoroughly that Peter has to stifle his giggles. A few moments go by before…“I uhm, I guess I also missed the hidden drawer in the desk first time round,” Tony says sheepishly, holding up a little device. “It’s… a range finder, but …what distance would we possibly have to span in here?”

Puzzled, they look around for a few minutes until something catches Peter’s eye. “There are two small lines on the walls, directly opposite of one another.”

“Here’s two more,” Tony says and points at two more fine pencil lines. “Guess we have to measure those distances and…”

“Use it as a code to unlock the third suitcase! Two distances, two locks. That can’t be a coincidence!”

Tony and Peter high-five when the suitcase eventually opens, only to groan in frustration when they find two more papers with drawn-on body parts. “Okay, so we have four of these now, one flashlight, another suitcase with a code lock and a closet door we can’t open,” Peter sums up, “Guess we have to take another look around.”

It turns out that it was Peter missing the key this time. “ _How the fuck could you have missed that_ ,” Tony scoffs, mimicking the boy, “It was on the top shelve.”

“Well, I’m not…I can’t… forget it.”

“You mean you can’t reach so high?” Tony busts out laughing when Peter pouts. “Just… try to see if it fits anywhere.”

To their surprise, the key unlocks the closet, revealing it to have no back cover. Instead, they find a hidden door. “HA, I _knew_ it. We DID it, that was easy!” Tony cheers, looking smug and proud, only to be brought down to earth when there’s another code lock attached to secret door. _“Jesus FUCKING Christ.”_

Peter studies a poster attached to the inside of the closet door, showing a human body with a few circles and some arrows. “Hey … There’s a foot circled on the poster and we have a paper with a foot on it, right? Four circles, four papers, four numbers. 4, 6, 1, 9” Intrigued, Tony presses the according numbers on the lock, but it doesn’t open. He glances at the poster again. “Maybe… it’s clockwise?”

“A-All right, uhm… right arm is 6, uhm, 1, 9, 4?”

The satisfying ‘click’ is music to their ears and grinning, they wrench the door open, stumbling into-

“A bathroom?” A rather small, dirty, _bloody_ bathroom, actually. “Do you think-?” Peter starts, only to _scream_ when another door to their left falls shut.

Tony spins around, looking at the boy, shook. “What is it?!” 

“T-The door… the d-door over there just c-closed. I-I think there’s someone behind it.”

“Uuuh, it’s probably the _murderer”_ , Tony mocks in a spooky voice, unable to suppress a teasing grin.

Peter huffs, gathering all his courage before walking over to the door. After hesitating for a few seconds, he grabs the knob and twists it, but the door’s now apparently locked. “Uhm… I guess we need another key?”

“Of course we do,” Tony says dully, eyeing the bloody shower curtain with disgust. “I’m not touching this.”

Peter does. However, there’s nothing in the shower tub, nothing at the sink, nothing on the walls. “Well, I’m lost.”

“What about the flashlight? Maybe there’s-“

“ _Black light,_ of course!” Peter takes out the torch of the bottom of his jeans, flicks it on and points at the walls. “YES! 2-3-8-1-5.”

“There’s no code lock on the door though. Oh, wait, we still have one more suitcase with-“

“A five digit lock!”

They can’t believe their luck when they find a key inside and quickly, they hurry back to the door. “I bet you a hundred bucks that the door leads to another room.” Tony groans when he turns out to be right.

The room actually looks quite scary. There’s a workbench with bloody tools and severed body parts, a box with human organs and a skeleton nailed to the right wall. And _another_ door with _another_ lock. While Tony is busy examining the workbench, Peter reads the sign hanging around the skeleton’s neck “ _’You can count on me’_ …Huh?”

“Well, you can count on me being done with this,” Tony remarks snidely, “But look at this, I found a set of keys in the box with the organs.

“You put your hand in _there_ but refused to touch the curtains?”

Tony ignores him but points out they need another code to unlock the chain connecting the set keys to a metal ring screwed on the bottom of the organ box. “It’s a digital lock and…yup, we only have ONE attempt.”

Taking another look around, Peter finds a wadded piece of paper on the floor near the skeleton “’ _I think he broke all of my ribs. I don’t know how long I can take this anymore_. _I need my bible._ ’ Uhm, okay? The word ‘ribs’ is underlined.”

“Wasn’t there a bible on the nightstand of the bed?” Tony ponders. “Maybe the code’s hidden in it somewhere. I’ll go and get it.” Peter nods eagerly and examines the door next. Hopefully, one of the keys will fit or-

“AAAAH!!” A loud scream from Tony causes him to jump two feet into the air. Terrified, the boy spins around just in time to see his mentor running back into the room, ashen-faced.

“W-W-What happened?”

“A-A man with… an axe. He w-was standing in the hotel room w-when I went in to-“

Peter can’t help himself and busts out laughing. “Don’t tell me it was the _murderer.”_ Before Tony can snap at (or strangle) him, the door separating the hotel room to the rest bangs shot, causing _both_ men to scream this time. A creepy, tinny voice sounds through the room next, sending a shiver down their spines. “Guess I found my new victims… You’ll be dead in eight minutes. Goodbye, _Tony_ Stark and _Peter.”_

Seconds later, a weird, white smoke starts filling the room, making it a lot harder to see. “ _Shit!”_ Peter yells, “Come on, we have to find the damn code! The bible was probably just a red herring.”

It’s Tony who finds a clue at one of the butcher knives lying around on the workbench. “’ _1 + 2 = 3 ||| 11 + 12 = 5 ||| 194 + ____ = [code]_ ’ What?? We need the right number for the equation, fast.”

Even after three more minutes of looking around, both men are still completely lost. “My head is fucking _killing_ me, I can’t concentrate anymore.”

Peter snorts. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten so wasted, then.”

“Hey, you were there, they forced me to drink so much.”

“Only because you managed to be exceptionally bad at both ‘Who am I’ _and_ charade.”

“Firstly, I wasn’t bad, and secondly, it was New Year’s Eve, so I have every right to-“

“Can you _stop,_ please? I want to get out of here before the countdown is over. If I can’t count on you to-… _OH MY GOD!”_

“What?” Tony asks befuddled when Peter bolts over to the skeleton. “ _Count ON ME. The RIBS!”_

“Can you please speak English?”

“It says ‘you can _count_ on me’ on the sign. There’s an underlined blank on the knife, right? And the word _RIBS_ is underlined on the piece of paper. That guy has…wait a second…twelve rib bones.”

“Oh my god, I think you’re on to something, kiddo,” Tony mutters, completely flabbergasted, grabbing the butcher knife again. “Okay, 12 plus 194 equals 206 ... the total number of bones in an average, grown-up human body.”

“Uhm… that’s not a _two_ digit code, though. Let me see the formula again. Why does it say 11 plus 12 equals 5, I don’t get it.”

Sweating, the two men stare at it for a while until Tony sighs dramatically. “The code is 17. You have to add the digits, not the number itself.”

With shaky fingers, Peter types _17_ into the lock, holding his breath… “YES! It worked.”

“Okay, get the keys, fast, come on!”

After a few seconds, Peter has unlocked the chain and bolts over to the door, trying key after key, getting more and more nervous when not one of them seems to fit. Finally, the door gives a jolt forward, but it seems to be clamped. “Just break it open, god dammit!”

“No, I got it,” the boy says, shutting the door once more to remove the latch he hadn’t noticed earlier. Just when he has finally moved it to the side and twists the knob again, Tony tackles the door – and Peter – from behind, causing both of them to stumble through the doorway, falling flat on the stomach with a loud THUDD. “I told you _I got it_ ”, Peter hisses through clenched teeth and struggles to his feet, only to face two gloatingly grinning men.

“What has taken you so long? We finished 15 minutes ago.”

“Seems like team ‘brain’ is no match for team ‘muscle’, huh, Steve?”

“Oh, yeah?” Tony snaps, glaring at the two. “We’ll see about that, Barnes. Let's break out of _prison_ next, shall we?”

Peter grins. He knew Tony would love Escape Rooms.

**Author's Note:**

> Uhm, yeah, sorry if it wasn't all that funny 😅 I’ve had this idea ever since I was in a room like this a few weeks ago (it was ten times harder and longer though lol), but I didn’t really know if it was a thing in the US or not until the Will Smith/Tom Holland video came out :D  
> PS: **Happy New Year/Decade🧨🎆🎇**


End file.
